Migration studies increasingly recognizes the role of mobility infrastructures in shaping migratory experiences, yet less attention has been paid to the process through which a maritime regime of mobility is progressively materialized across different spatial stages. This article examines Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) to explore this process through the concept of aquatic presence/absence. Framed by an interdisciplinary framework synthesizing migration studies and mobility studies, the article argues that the novel constructs the changing presence of the aquatic through the progressive materialization of a maritime regime of mobility. In the first part of the novel, Land, aquatic presence takes three modalities: aquatic vision, aquatic infrastructure, and aquatic operation. River, the second part, shows how the dispersed conditions of maritime mobility are transformed into actual organized movement. Riverine space becomes materially involved in the circulation of commodities and migrants, while the voyage becomes an early stage in the material realization of the emerging maritime regime through the colonial transportation of opium and indentured laborers. At the same time, riverine mobility begins to reorganize social relations by weakening terrestrial affiliations and creating conditions for new forms of collective association. The third part, Sea, reveals the completion of the maritime regime of mobility as the Ibis enters the open sea and crosses Kala Pani. This completion is demonstrated through the weakening of terrestrial belonging, the establishment of maritime sovereignty, and the physiological and temporal transformation of migrant bodies. Thus, Land, River, and Sea should not be understood as three separate forms of movement but as successive moments in the formation of a single maritime regime of mobility. The contribution of the study lies, first, in extending mobility studies by showing how a mobility regime is progressively assembled through the articulation of infrastructure, circulation, spatial organization, governance, embodied practice, and temporality; and second, in demonstrating how literary narrative can make the historical and material formation of such a regime visible through its spatial organization. In this reading, aquatic presence/absence is not a simple binary but a changing condition produced through the materialization of mobility: the aquatic moves from imagined horizon to dispersed infrastructure, organized riverine circulation, and finally a fully operative maritime regime that transforms migrant existence.